"There is nothing worse than believing you are being observed by a third party unnecessarily" [watch the black probot in video] From [HERE] The sky over the Circuit Court for Baltimore City on June 23 was the color of a dull nickel, and a broad deck of lowering clouds threatened rain. A couple dozen people with signs—“Justice 4 Freddie Gray” and “The whole damn system is guilty as hell”—lingered by the corner of the courthouse, watching the network TV crews rehearse their standups. Sheriff’s officers in bulletproof vests clustered around the building’s doors, gripping clubs with both hands.

Inside, a judge was delivering the verdict in the case of Caesar Goodson, the only Baltimore police officer facing a murder charge for the death of Freddie Gray. In April 2015, Gray’s neck was broken in the back of a police van, and prosecutors had argued that Goodson purposefully drove the vehicle recklessly, careening through the city, to toss Gray around.

The verdict trickled out of the courthouse in text messages: not guilty, all counts. Ralph Pritchett Sr., who’s spent each of his 52 years in Baltimore, stood on the sidewalk among the protesters. He chewed on a toothpick and shook his head slowly. In a city with more than 700 street-level police cameras, he wondered, shouldn’t the authorities have had video of Gray’s ride?

“This whole city is under a siege of cameras,” said Pritchett, a house painter who helps run a youth center in a low-income, high-crime neighborhood called Johnston Square. “In fact, they observed Freddie Gray himself the morning of his arrest on those cameras, before they picked him up. They could have watched that van, too, but no—they missed that one. I thought the cameras were supposed to protect us. But I’m thinking they’re there to just contradict anything that might be used against the City of Baltimore. Do they use them for justice? Evidently not.”

Pritchett had no idea that as he spoke, a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane’s wide-angle cameras captured an area of roughly 30 square miles and continuously transmitted real-time images to analysts on the ground. The footage from the plane was instantly archived and stored on massive hard drives, allowing analysts to review it weeks later if necessary.

Since the beginning of the year, the Baltimore Police Department had been using the plane to investigate all sorts of crimes, from property thefts to shootings. The Cessna sometimes flew above the city for as many as 10 hours a day, and the public had no idea it was there.

A company called Persistent Surveillance Systems based in Dayton, Ohio, provided the service to the police, and the funding came from a private donor. No public disclosure of the program had ever been made.

Outside the courthouse, several of the protesters began marching around the building, chanting for justice

A half block from the city's central police station, in a spare office suite above a parking garage, Ross McNutt, the founder of Persistent Surveillance Systems, monitored the city's reaction to the Goodson verdict by staring at a bank of computer monitors. "It's pretty quiet out there," he said. The riots that convulsed the city after Gray was killed wouldn't be repeated. "A few protesters on the corner, and not much else. The police want us to keep flying, but the clouds are getting in the way." [see the McNutt video here]

McNutt said something about not being able to control the weather, pretending to shrug it off, but he was frustrated. He wanted to please the cops. Since this discreet arrangement began in January, it had felt like a make-or-break opportunity for McNutt. His company had been trying for years to snag a long-term contract with an American metropolitan police department. Baltimore seemed like his best shot to date, one that could lead to more work. He's told police departments that his system might help them reduce crime by as much as 20 percent in their cities, and he was hoping this Baltimore job would allow him to back up the claim. "I don't have good statistical data yet, but that's part of the reason we're here," he said. McNutt believes the technology would be most effective if used in a transparent, publicly acknowledged manner; part of the system's effectiveness, he said, rests in its potential to deter criminal activity.

McNutt is an Air Force Academy graduate, physicist, and MIT-trained astronautical engineer who in 2004 founded the Air Force's Center for Rapid Product Development. The Pentagon asked him if he could develop something to figure out who was planting the roadside bombs that were killing and maiming American soldiers in Iraq. In 2006 he gave the military Angel Fire, a wide-area, live-feed surveillance system that could cast an unblinking eye on an entire city.

The system was built around an assembly of four to six commercially available industrial imaging cameras, synchronized and positioned at different angles, then attached to the bottom of a plane. As the plane flew, computers stabilized the images from the cameras, stitched them together and transmitted them to the ground at a rate of one per second. This produced a searchable, constantly updating photographic map that was stored on hard drives. His elevator pitch was irresistible: "Imagine Google Earth with TiVo capability."

The images weren't perfect. Analysts on the ground could see individual cars moving through the streets, but they couldn't tell what make or model they might be. Pedestrians were just pixelated dots; you couldn't distinguish a man from a woman, or an Iraqi civilian from an American soldier. Individual recognition, however, wasn't the point; any dot could be followed backward or forward in time, which opened up all sorts of investigative possibilities.

If a roadside bomb exploded while the camera was in the air, analysts could zoom in to the exact location of the explosion and rewind to the moment of detonation. Keeping their eyes on that spot, they could further rewind the footage to see a vehicle, for example, that had stopped at that location to plant the bomb. Then they could backtrack to see where the vehicle had come from, marking all of the addresses it had visited. They also could fast-forward to see where the driver went after planting the bomb—perhaps a residence, or a rebel hideout, or a stash house of explosives. More than merely identifying an enemy, the technology could identify an enemy network.

McNutt demonstrated the prototype to a group of Marines at a California base in 2006. "They called up their general," McNutt recalls, "and when he saw it, he said, 'I need this, and I need it right now—in Fallujah.'"

Eventually another military unit took control of the project and completed the development of Angel Fire at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In 2007 the technology was deployed to Iraq. Angel Fire was eventually upgraded with all-weather and nighttime capabilities and then used as the basis for another system, called Blue Devil, which coupled wide-area cameras with narrow-focus zoom lenses in the same package.

The deputy spokesman for the secretary general, Farhan Haq, said in an email this week that “over the past year, the U.N. has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera.” He added that a “new response will be presented publicly within the next two months, once it has been fully elaborated, agreed with the Haitian authorities and discussed with member states.”

The statement comes on the heels of a confidential report sent to Mr. Ban by a longtime United Nations adviser on Aug. 8. Written by Philip Alston, a New York University law professor who serves as one of a few dozen experts, known as special rapporteurs, who advise the organization on human rights issues, the draft language stated plainly that the epidemic “would not have broken out but for the actions of the United Nations.”

The secretary general’s acknowledgment, by contrast, stopped short of saying that the United Nations specifically caused the epidemic. Nor does it indicate a change in the organization’s legal position that it is absolutely immune from legal actions, including a federal lawsuit brought in the United States on behalf of cholera victims seeking billions in damages stemming from the Haiti crisis.

But it represents a significant shift after more than five years of high-level denial of any involvement or responsibility of the United Nations in the outbreak, which has killed at least 10,000 people and sickened hundreds of thousands. Cholera victims suffer from dehydration caused by severe diarrhea or vomiting.

Special rapporteurs’ reports are technically independent guidance, which the United Nations can accept or reject. United Nations officials have until the end of this week to respond to the report, which will then go through revisions, but the statement suggests a new receptivity to its criticism.

In the 19-page report, obtained from an official who had access to it, Mr. Alston took issue with the United Nations’ public handling of the outbreak, which was first documented in mid-October 2010, shortly after people living along the Meille River began dying from the disease.

The first victims lived near a base housing 454 United Nations peacekeepers freshly arrived from Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway, and waste from the base often leaked into the river. Numerous scientists have since argued that the base was the only plausible source of the outbreak — whose real death toll, one study found, could be much higher than the official numbers state — but United Nations officials have consistently insisted that its origins remain up for debate.

Mr. Alston wrote that the United Nations’ Haiti cholera policy “is morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating.” He added, “It is also entirely unnecessary.” The organization’s continuing denial and refusal to make reparations to the victims, he argued, “upholds a double standard according to which the U.N. insists that member states respect human rights, while rejecting any such responsibility for itself.”

He said, “It provides highly combustible fuel for those who claim that U.N. peacekeeping operations trample on the rights of those being protected, and it undermines both the U.N.’s overall credibility and the integrity of the Office of the Secretary-General.”

Mr. Alston went beyond criticizing the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to blame the entire United Nations system. “As the magnitude of the disaster became known, key international officials carefully avoided acknowledging that the outbreak had resulted from discharges from the camp,” he noted.

His most severe criticism was reserved for the organization’s Office of Legal Affairs, whose advice, he wrote, “has been permitted to override all of the other considerations that militate so powerfully in favor of seeking a constructive and just solution.” Its interpretations, he said, have “trumped the rule of law.”

Mr. Alston also argued in his report that, as The New York Times has reported, the United Nations’ cholera eradication program has failed. Infection rates have been rising every year in Haiti since 2014, as the organization struggles to raise the $2.27 billion it says is needed to eradicate the disease from member states. No major water or sanitation projects have been completed in Haiti; two pilot wastewater processing plants built there in the wake of the epidemic quickly closed because of a lack of donor funds.

In a separate internal report released days ago after being withheld for nearly a year, United Nations auditors said a quarter of the sites run by the peacekeepers with the organization’s Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or Minustah, that they had visited were still discharging their waste into public canals as late as 2014, four years after the epidemic began.

“Victims are living in fear because the disease is still out there,” Mario Joseph, a prominent Haitian human rights lawyer representing cholera victims, told demonstrators in Port-au-Prince last month. He added, “If the Nepalese contingent returns to defecate in the water again, they will get the disease again, only worse.”

In 2011, when families of 5,000 Haitian cholera victims petitioned the United Nations for redress, its Office of Legal Affairs simply declared their claims “not receivable.” (Mr. Alston called that argument “wholly unconvincing in legal terms.”)

Those families and others then sued the United Nations, including Mr. Ban and the former Minustah chief Edmond Mulet, in federal court in New York. (In November, Mr. Ban promoted Mr. Mulet to be his chief of staff.) The United Nations refused to appear in court, claiming diplomatic immunity under its charter, leaving Justice Department lawyers to defend it instead. That case is now pending a decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

The redress demanded by families of the 10,000 people killed and 800,000 affected would reach $40 billion, Mr. Alston wrote — and that figure does not take into account “those certain to die and be infected in the years ahead.”

“Since this is almost five times the total annual budget for peacekeeping worldwide, it is a figure that is understandably seen as prohibitive and unrealistic,” he said. Still, he argued: “The figure of $40 billion should stand as a warning of the consequences that could follow if national courts become convinced that the abdication policy is not just unconscionable but also legally unjustified. The best way to avoid that happening is for the United Nations to offer an appropriate remedy.”

Mr. Alston, who declined to comment for this article, will present the final report at the opening of the General Assembly in September, when presidents, prime ministers and monarchs from nearly every country gather at United Nations headquarters in New York.

Mr. Haq said the secretary general’s office “wanted to take this opportunity to welcome this vital report,” which he added “will be a valuable contribution to the U.N. as we work towards a significant new set of U.N. actions.”

Shocking new details have been made public about the CIA’s torture program as the agency has declassified dozens of once-secret documents. A portion of the new documents deal with a prisoner named Gul Rahman, who froze to death at a secret CIA prison in 2002. Rahman’s family is now suing CIA-contracted psychologists James Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen, who helped design the U.S. torture program. The new records also show a prisoner who was waterboarded 83 times was likely willing to cooperate with interrogators before the torture. The account from medical personnel who helped with the first waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah deals a major blow to the CIA’s insistence it gained crucial information through torture. Zubaydah said he made up fake terrorist plots in order to stop the abuse. Another partially declassified document reveals President Bush was uneasy about what the agency was doing. One 2006 memo read, "The president was concerned about the image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on themselves." We speak with Dror Ladin, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who helped win the release of these documents. [MORE]

>>> Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request about the poisonous nature of Flint, Michigan's water, the EPA quietly released 5,155 pages of internal documents. They placed the humongous PDF file in a search-only archive with cryptic header info, meaning that you have to know exactly what you're looking for.

According to the EPA's name for the PDF file, 1) it was released on May 12, 2016, and 2) there are more documents related to this request, as this is referred to as an interim release. It was released due to a request from John Flesher of the Associated Press, who asked for

"electronic copies of all EPA memos, e-mails and other documents that pertain in any way to the subject of corrosion control additives in the public water system of Flint, Michigan. In particular, these should include any documents that involve decisions not to use corrosion control after the city began drawing water from the Flint River in 2014."

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [official website] on Tuesday declassified [press release] 50 documents related to its detention and Interrogation program pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [text] request. This several hundred-page release [FOIA archive] covers internal CIA documents as well as other documents that were cited in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [official website] report on the program. The files expose details [NYT report] about the agency's treatment of terrorism suspects after the 9/11 attacks. One account included a detailed internal investigation in the interrogation and death of Gul Rahman, a militant suspected of ties to al Qaeda, who died at a CIA prison in Afghanistan in 2002 after being doused with water and chained to a concrete floor as temperatures dropped below freezing. The files also include detailed descriptions of the inner workings of the CIA's "black site" prisons, messages from field officers who expressed misgivings about the treatment of detainees, secret memos objecting to medical treatments later condemned as torture, and mistaken arrests of innocent civilians and subsequently attempted cover-ups. The documents also include memos filed by senior CIA officials defending the interrogation program as saving thousands of lives. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [advocacy website], which filed the request for the documents, stated that these documents "under­score the cruelty of the methods used in its secret, overseas black sites." [MORE]

From [HERE] African Americans are incarcerated in state prisons across the country at more than five times the rate of whites, and at least ten times the rate in five states. This report documents the rates of incarceration for whites, African Americans, and Hispanics in each state, identifies three contributors to racial and ethnic disparities in imprisonment, and provides recommendations for reform. [PDF file]

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 35% of state prisoners are white, 38% are black, and 21% are Hispanic.7) In twelve states more than half of the prison population is African American. Though the reliability of data on ethnicity is not as strong as it is for race estimates, the Hispanic population in state prisons is as high as 61% in New Mexico and 42% in both Arizona and California. In an additional seven states, at least one in five inmates is Hispanic.8) While viewing percentages reveals a degree of disproportion for people of color when compared to the overall general population (where 62% are white, 13% are black, and 17% are Hispanic),9) viewing the composition of prison populations from this perspective only tells some of the story. In this report we present the rates of racial and ethnic disparity, which allow a portrayal of the overrepresentation of people of color in the prison system accounting for population in the general community.10) This shows odds of imprisonment for individuals in various racial and ethnic categories.

It is important to note at the outset that, given the absence or unreliability of ethnicity data in some states, the racial/ethnic disparities in those states may be understated. Since most Hispanics in those instances would be counted in the white prison population, the white rate of incarceration would therefore appear higher than is the case, and consequently the black/white and Hispanic/white ratios of disparity would be lower as well. In four states, data on ethnicity is not reported to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nor is it provided in the state department of corrections’ individual annual reports. These states are Alabama, Maryland, Montana, and Vermont. There are most assuredly people in prison in these states who are Hispanic, but since the state does not record this information, the exact number is unknown. [MORE]

Cease Fire is a Vague Term to White Folks. Israelis have come to a mournful, two-minute standstill as sirens pierced the air in remembrance of the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. Israel's annual Holocaust memorial day, marked Thursday, is one of the most solemn on the nation's calendar.

As the siren sounded, cars and buses pulled over on the side of highways and roads. Motorists stepped out of their cars and pedestrians stopped in their tracks, bowing their heads as they remembered those who perished. On Wednesday, Mr. Kill 'em All, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Iran to the Nazis and warned the Islamic Republic must be prevented from obtaining nuclear weapons.[MORE] After the 120 seconds of silence its back to killing every Brown person in sight!

Join the Gang. According to Hitler, Jewish people were not white people- they were an inferior race, an alien threat to racial (white) purity and community. In Nazi Germany (1933-1945}, a genocidal imperative was declared when the Semite and gypsy populations were classified as non-white and therefore were deemed worthy of destruction. (The word Semite is from the Latin prefix, semi meaning "half' - half Black and half white, and that means mulatto (non-white).[MORE]Nevertheless, today Israeli Jews seem willing to do anything to become full fledged honorary members of the 'white family' and to demonstrate their commitment to white supremacy/racism.

Psychopaths

According to Dr. Bobby Wright, "in their relationship with Non-white people, Whites function as psychopaths and their behavior reflects an underlying biologically transmitted proclivity with roots deep in their evolutionary history. The psychopath is an individual who is constantly in conflict with other persons or groups. He is unable to experience guilt, is completely selfish and callous, and has a total disregard for the rights of others. This premise is supported by overwhelming scientific evidence.

Behavioral scientists generally agree that the outstanding characteristics of the psychopathic personality are the almost complete absence of ethical or moral development and an almost total disregard for appropriate patterns of behavior. This characteristic has led to a misunderstanding of the psychopath as someone who does not know the difference between right and wrong. This belief is not true; psychopaths simply ignore the concept of right and wrong.

Unlike other extreme pathological syndromes, only a very small percentage of psychopaths are committed to mental hospitals with another small percentage ending up in penal institutions. The majority of psychopaths function very well in society." [MORE]

An emergency rescue worker carries a child's body found in the Daloo family house rubble following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, on November 18, 2012. Palestinian medical officials say at least 10 civilians, including women and young children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. AP

Shaheed Muatazz al-Sawwaf, 6 years old June 23, 2012. Rosa Schiano

Bissane Barhoum, 3, screams as she is treated by medics for a head wound caused by falling down stairs when she ran in panic reacting to a nearby blast, according to her uncle, at the an-Najar hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza strip, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2009. AP

Palestinian medics wheel a man wounded in an Israeli missile strike into hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Friday, Jan. 16, 2009. Israel's Security Cabinet will vote Saturday night on an Egyptian proposal for a truce to end the 3-week-old offensive against Gaza's Hamas rulers, a senior government officia

From [HERE] and [HERE] and [MORE] Hundreds of individuals on Wednesday filed suit [complaint, PDF] for medical malpractice against Johns Hopkins University for its role in government medical experiments that took place in Guatemala in the 1940s and 50s. During this time, individuals were deliberately infected with venereal diseases, including syphilis and gonorrhea, without their consent. The individuals were told that they were undergoing "routine medical tests" and that the medication they were being administered was "for their own good."

The lawsuit, which also names the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, alleges that both institutions helped “design, support, encourage and finance” the experiments by employing scientists and physicians involved in the tests, which were designed to ascertain if penicillin could prevent the diseases.

The suit also claims that predecessor companies of the pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb supplied penicillin for use in the experiments, which they knew to be both secretive and non-consensual.

The experiments, which occurred between 1945 and 1956, were kept secret until they were discovered in 2010 by a college professor, Susan Reverby.

The experiments were allegedly targeted at "children, soldiers, prison inmates, psychiatric hospital patients, and orphans." The suit was filed on behalf of 774 former research subjects and their families and seeks $1 billion in damages. According to the complaint, officials at Johns Hopkins had "substantial influence" over the studies, including advising the federal government on how to spend research funds. Specifically, it alleges that Johns Hopkins, along with other named defendants "participated in, approved, encouraged, directed, and aided and abetted human subject experiments in Guatemala."

Included within the legal claim are graphic descriptions of some of the methods used by the researchers to infect their subjects:

During the experiments the following occurred:

Prostitutes were infected with venereal disease and then provided for sex to subjects for intentional transmission of the disease;

Subjects were inoculated by injection of syphilis spirochaetes into the spinal fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord, under the skin, and on mucous membranes;

An emulsion containing syphilis or gonorrhoea was spread under the foreskin of the penis in male subjects;

The penis of male subjects was scraped and scarified and then coated with the emulsion containing syphilis or gonorrhea;

A woman from the psychiatric hospital was injected with syphilis, developed skin lesions and wasting, and then had gonorrhoeal pus from a male subject injected into both of her eyes and;

Children were subjected to blood studies to check for the presence of venereal disease.

Synthetic marijuana is nothing like marijuana. It is deception to even call it marijuana. It is deadly chemical shit to smoke that can destroy your brain or kill you. Its action in the brain may be similar to real marijuana but the physical effect to the brain are different. [MORE]

Scooby Snax comes in the flavors, Watermelon, Green Apple, Blueberry Bliss, Strawberry Smash, Kush and others similar to the flavors available for blunts. Its legal to sell and purchase it. There are no time or age restrictions on its sale in many states and its cheap. And there is no need to special order it on the internet [like white kids do], in the hood it is available at corner stores, gas stations or fine carry out establishments - many of these places are open 24 hrs. a day.

Scooby Doo is being used undoubtedly without the blessing of Warner Brothers Animation/Hanna-Barbera, the animation studio that produced the cartoon and own all its rights. For what reason has the white owned and controlled company done nothing to stop the use of its copyrighted image? The sale and distribution of this genocidal bullshit obviously furthers the goal of maintaining white domination and the destruction of our youth and our communities. [MORE]

When Making a Business Decision the only "color" that matters is White. How appropriate that the trademarked, copyrighted image of D.C. Comics character Bizarro is being used to sell synthetic marijuana to Black & Brown kids. "Bizarro is the perfect imperfect duplicate of Superman, acting as his antagonist or ally depending on the situation. Originally created to be Superman's clone by his nemesis Lex Luthor, his poorly constructed genetics caused him to become the opposite. There have since been many Bizarros based on other characters, and they all live on the alternate Bizarro World. The latest one is avaialble at every corner store in the hood. It is legal, sold to kids as a "potpourri product." Bizarro will not make you super - it will fuck up your mind. [Photo courtesy of Vincent Brown. See any of these on the ground lately?]

Simple and plain synthetic marijuana is nothing like marijuana. It is deception to even call it marijuana. It is deadly chemical shit to smoke that can destroy your brain or kill you. Its action in the brain may be similar to real marijuana but the physical effect to the brain are different. [MORE]

Like Scooby Snax, Bizarro is sold as a "potpourri product," with the disclaimer that it is not intended for human consumption. But it is synthetic "marijuana" smoked by users to get high - real high or a zombiefied high. In general, potpourri is packaged in glossy packaging and comes in the flavors, Watermelon, Green Apple, Blueberry Bliss, Strawberry Smash, Kush and others similar to the flavors available for blunts. There are no time or age restrictions on its sale and its cheap. And there is no need to special order it on the internet [like white kids do], in the Hood it is available at nearly every corner store, gas station or fine carry out establishment - many of these places are open 24 hrs. a day. Don't believe BW, go and see for yourself and then travel to a white neighborhood and see if you can find some.

Bizarro is being used undoubtedly without the blessing of D.C. Comics. For what reason has the white owned and controlled company done nothing to stop the use of its copyrighted image? The sale and distribution of this bullshit obviously furthers the goal of maintaining white domination and the destruction of our youth and our communities. [MORE]

Basically, in their relations with each other, white people (people who classify themselves as white)treat each other humanely. But in their relations with non-whites, racist white people function as psychopaths. Psychopaths know the difference between right and wrong but simply ignore it. [MORE] Israeli's classify themselves as white and classify Palestinians as non-white. [Observe that racists always do the classifying. The victims of white supremacy (non-whites) cannot classify themselves without their approval. MORE] It is ironic that Hitler classified Jews as non-white or not pure white - who therefore had to be destroyed. [MORE]

The NY Times reports, "Israel’s election has done a lot to reveal the challenges facing the country and the intentions of the men who seek to lead it. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s [aka King Bibi] outright rejection of a Palestinian state and his racist rant against Israeli Arab voters on Tuesday showed that he has forfeited any claim to representing all Israelis.

Mr. Netanyahu showed that he was desperate, and craven, enough to pull out all the stops. On Monday, he promised that if his Likud faction remained in power, he would never allow the creation of a Palestinian state, thus repudiating a position he had taken in 2009." [MORE] The NY Times missed the point that this message clearly resonated with the Israeli votary.

4th Media points out, "the relationship between the U.S. and Israel in the last 6 years under the Obama administration has never been stronger. President Barack Obama requested a record $3.1 billion in military assistance to Israel for the 2013 fiscal year. The requested amount is not just the largest assistance request for Israel ever; it is the largest foreign assistance request ever in U.S. history.

President Barack H. Obama and Netanyahu’s alleged tenuous relationship is not what it seems. [It is gossip stuff, like a rapper battle]. Sure they probably annoy each other, but Obama has provided U.S. foreign aid just as every U.S. President before him." [MORE] Pics below of the Gaza genocide offensive are from [HERE] White Supremacy/Racism is carried out by deception and/or violence.

From [HERE] Thousands of acres of wheat and other cereal crops have been destroyed by Israeli police in the Palestinian Bedouin village of Rakhama in Negev.

According to Ali Freijat, a local resident, as many as 14 Israeli tractors escorted by in excess of 50 Israeli police vehicles destroyed the agricultural products and leveled the land early on Tuesday, Ma’an news agency reported.

"This is vandalism through which they plan to displace the Bedouins from the Negev so as to create a Jewish state free of Arabs,” Freijat added.

He further noted that the Israeli regime forces have been trying to confiscate the land for many years.

“However, my message to them is that if you turn over the land a million times, and if you demolish our homes a thousand times we will continue to live on this land and won't allow anybody to take it from us,” he added.

A recently published report entitled “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror”, published by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Ala, has illustrated the need for re-examining a sordid period in United States history which has never been acknowledged on an official level.

Although the practice originated during slavery, after the conclusion of the Civil War and beginning of Reconstruction, extra-judicial killings of African Americans became an integral part of the methods of exploitation and social containment of the former enslaved people.

The Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1866 as a secret organization led by former plantation owners and Confederate military officials such as Nathan B. Forrest, who is often credited as the engineer of one of worst massacres of the Civil War at Fort Pillow, Tennessee in 1864.

The study places the rise of lynching within an historical context. After the Civil War and the legal abolition of slavery, European Americans sought to re-establish their dominance over African people.

In a section entitled “Second Slavery After the Civil War”, the authors emphasize that “white southern identity was grounded in a belief that whites are inherently superior to African Americans. Following the war, whites reacted violently to the notion that they would now have to treat their former human property as equals and pay for their labor.

Plantation owners attacked black people simply for claiming their freedom. In May 1866, in Memphis, Tennessee, forty-six African Americans were killed; ninety-one houses, four churches, and twelve schools were burned to the ground; at least five women were raped; and many black people fled the city permanently.” (EJI Report, p. 7)

Study Contributes to Field Started by African American Woman

This report by EJI continues the work of other scholars and Civil Rights organizations since the late 19th century. By 1892, the phenomenon of public lynchings attracted the attention of former school teacher and journalist Ida B. Wells, who started an international campaign after three African American men were taken from a jail cell in Memphis, Tennessee and shot to death by law-enforcement agents.

A PBS documentary from 2002 entitled “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow” notes “Tom Moss and two of his friends, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, were arrested for defending themselves against an attack on Moss’ store. Moss was a highly respected figure in the black community, a postman as well as the owner of a grocery store. A white competitor, enraged that Moss had drawn away his black customers, hired some off-duty deputy sheriffs to destroy the store.”

This tragic narrative continues recounting that “Moss and his friends, not knowing the men were deputies, resisted. A gun battle broke out and several deputies were wounded. Moss, his two friends, and one hundred other black supporters were arrested. Several nights later, masked vigilantes dragged Moss and his two friends from their cells, took them to a deserted railroad yard, and shot them to death.”

Wells was later driven out of Memphis after she had exposed the false pretext under which many lynching were justified. This series of events resulted in thousands of African Americans leaving Memphis in mass, migrating to Oklahoma during the subsequent months and years.

The following year, 1893, Wells toured Britain to lecture on lynching in the U.S. further revealing to an international audience the plight of African Americans. She would re-locate to Chicago and continue the work from there after the Memphis newspaper offices that she owned were fire bombed by a white mob empowered by a local magistrate.

Wells wrote and published the first social scientific study of the mob killings of African Americans. The report was published as a pamphlet initially in 1895 under the title “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States.”

Later the anti-lynching organizer went on to be a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The NAACP campaigned for decades against lynching and unsuccessfully for federal legislation to outlaw the widespread practice.

In 1951 under the sponsorship of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), Atty. William L. Patterson, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and cultural worker and activist Paul Robeson published “We Charge Genocide”, a petition submitted to the United Nations which documented years of racial violence against African Americans carried out with impunity in full view of white officials, law-enforcement agencies and the courts.

Even during the height of the mass Civil Rights Movement during 1955-1968, many more African Americans and their allies were murdered at the hands of white police officers and racist mobs.

Study Finds Additional Cases Previously Undocumented

According to the publication, “EJI researchers documented 3959 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 700 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.

Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation.” (Introduction)

This study utilizes sources which indicate that the practice was far more widespread than previously suggested. The authors acknowledged the work of academic Stewart E. Tolnay as well as Tuskegee University in Alabama, but also drew upon additional cases found in the African American press which was in its classical period during the late 19th and early decades of the 20th century.

The Death Penalty as Legalized Lynching

After World War I with the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to urbanized regions of the North and West of the U.S., there was a decline in public lynchings. Nonetheless, these acts of racial terror continued through other means including state-sanctioned executions.

The report says “By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time. Two-thirds of those executed in the 1930s were black, and the trend continued. As African Americans fell to just 22 percent of the South’s population between 1910 and 1950, they constituted 75 percent of those executed in the South during that period.” (p. 21)

This study documents the continuation of this process into the modern era citing that “In the 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court considered statistical evidence demonstrating that Georgia decision makers were more than four times as likely to impose death for the killing of a white person than a black person.

Accepting the data as accurate, the Court described racial bias in sentencing as ‘an inevitable part of our criminal justice system’ and upheld Warren McCleskey’s death sentence because he failed to identify a ‘constitutionally significant risk of racial bias’ in his case.”

Legal Lynching Continues Across the U.S.

The report reaffirms that the current wave of police killings and other racist attacks are part and parcel of the system of national oppression and social control utilized by the ruling class to exploit and contain African people from the 19th century to the present.

Today in the aftermath of Civil Rights legislation passed during the 1950s and 1960s and the ascendancy of African American elected officials including the president, people are still being denied justice.

Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Aiyana Stanley Jones, Tamir Rice and countless others have been killed by police officers who remain unscathed by prosecutors and the courts. The Justice Department has not brought any charges against these officers after local authorities failed to indict and arrest the perpetrators.

Undoubtedly it will take a revolution to overthrow the legacy of racial terrorism in the U.S. The African American and other oppressed peoples must be totally liberated from national oppression before they can expect any real justice that protects and values their lives from the ravages of state-supported violence and political repression.

Mr. Abayomi Azikiwe, Editor, Pan-African News Wire, is one of the frequent contributors for The 4th Media.

Surveillance technology known as ‘Stingray’ -- used to trick phones into connecting to them by mimicking cell towers -- can block or drop phone calls and disrupt other mobile devices that use the same cell network, according to a recent court disclosure.

As RT reported last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently disclosed that law enforcement officials in Florida used ‘Stingray’ surveillance to track cell phone locations on more than 1,800 occasions, all without court search warrants.

The Harris Corporation’s ‘Stingray’ is the most well known of the controversial spying technology, used by the FBI, the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency and many state and local police agencies. By impersonating cell towers, the devices force phones in the area to broadcast information that can be used to identify and locate users.

The ACLU’s recent disclosure included a court filing that uncovered the ability of 'Stingray' to negate cell phone calls by either downgrading mobile devices from 3G and 4G connectivity to 2G -- enabling them to access identification and location information -- or by the devices' "catch-and-release" operations.

“As each phone tries to connect, [the stingray device] will say, ‘I’m really busy right now so go use a different tower. So rather than catching the phone, it will release it,” Chris Soghoian, the ACLU’s chief technologist, told WIRED of the “catch-and-release” theory.

The court filing made by FBI Special Agent Michael A. Scimeca did not specify how a ‘Stingray’ would disrupt calls, only that they had the ability to do so.

“The moment it tries to connect, [the stingray] can reject every single phone” that is not the targeted phone, Soghoian added.

‘Stingray’ devices are small enough to fit in a police vehicle and can even be carried by hand. They can identify telephone numbers, unique identifying numbers, and the locations of all cell phones in range. They can also log the phone numbers called and texted by a connected phone.

Steel Reserve is an American lager brand owned and produced by Steel Brewing Company, which is owned by Miller, a company operated by white folks. The drink comes in "Black" and "Silver" varieties, also known as "Triple Export Malt Liquor" and "High Gravity Lager", respectively. It is noted for its high alcohol content (typically 8.1% ABV) and low price.

Steel Reserve is sold in 40 US fl oz (1.2 l) bottles. It is now available in Blackberry flavor and features moderate aromas of artificial grape and blackberry with a very heavy amount of sugar (kind of reminds of Grape Crush soda). Sold on every corner in Black and Brown hoods everywhere, 24/7. Complete your genocidal programming with some watermelon Scooby Snax. Blow your mind naturally [HERE] [photo courtesy of Vince Brown.]

From [HERE] and [HERE] During the Israeli bombardment and shelling of the Gaza Strip last summer, an Israeli soldier approached a 74-year-old Palestinian woman Ghalya Abu-Rida to give her a sip of water. He gave her the water, took a photo with her and then he shot her in the head from a distance of one metre. He then watched as she bled to death, the Palestine Information Centre reported.

This is how Ahmad Qdeh, a journalist in Al-Aqsa TV, described the scene that he witnessed during the latest Israeli aggression.

The field executions were among the stories Qdeh reported during the Israeli aggression on Gaza Strip. He said: “Ghalya Ahmad Abu-Rida lived in the Khuza’a area in the east of Khan Younis city. I live in that area too and I made a television report on her story after the Israeli soldiers executed her during the aggression.”

“During the aggression, an Israeli soldier approached the old woman and took a photo for another soldier while giving her water. They then executed her by shooting her in the head from a distance of one metre and let her bleed until she died,” he added.

Ghalya was born in 1941. She lived by herself in a room near her brothers’ house in the Abu-Rida neighbourhood of Khuza’a. She had no children. Her neighbourhood was one of the first places invaded by the Israeli army during the aggression.

From [HERE] Former US drone sensor operator Brandon Bryant admits he “couldn’t stand” himself for his participation in the country’s drone program for six years – firing on targets whose identities often went unconfirmed.

Since 2001, and increasingly under the Obama administration, the US has been carrying out drone strikes against targets believed to be affiliated with terrorist organizations in countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. The program, which has been shrouded in secrecy, has been routinely criticized for the high number of resultant civilian casualties.

Pakistan’s Peshawar High Court ruled in 2013 that the attacks constitute a war crime and violate the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Meanwhile the Obama administration continues to insist that drone warfare is a precise and effective method of combat.

According to data collected by the human rights group Reprieve and published last November, attempts to kill 41 targeted individuals across Pakistan and Yemen resulted in the deaths of some 1,147 people. Often a kill requires multiple strikes, the group noted. [have any white people been killed by drones?]

According to a number of global mainstream media sources, the Pentagon is covering up a disturbing video that was never made public with the rest of the recent torture report.

According to various well respected journalists, including Seymour Hersh, the appalling video was recorded at Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture dungeon in Iraq that made headlines roughly a decade ago, when the inhumane tactics being used at the prison were exposed.

Sadly, it seems that the evidence released years ago was only scratching the surface.

While the video has remained under wraps thus far, Hersh says it is only a matter of time before it comes out.

Giving a speech at the ACLU last week after the senate torture report was initially released, Hersh gave some insight into what was on the Pentagon’s secret tape.

“Debating about it, ummm … Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

The Ebola epidemic fatalities in West Africa have reached approximately 8,000, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

The WHO said on Friday that out of 19,695 recorded cases of Ebola infection 7,693 had died in West Africa.

This is while the figures released on December 22 showed 7,518 fatalities out of 19,340 infections in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, WHO added.

The disease has taken at least 7,708 peoples’ lives around the globe including eight in Nigeria, which was declared free of Ebola in October, six in Mali, and one in the United States, the organization said.

There were no deaths in Spain and Senegal, which have both been declared Ebola-free; however, one infection case was reported in each country, according to the world body.

The WHO said Sierra Leone as the country with the most infections has overtaken Liberia.

Liberia, which was known as the hardest-hit country, recorded 7,862 cases and 3,384 deaths on December 20, showing a clear decrease in transmission, the WHO said.

The outbreak started a year ago in Guinea, where the tally counted 2,630 Ebola cases and 1,654 deaths as of December 24.

Ebola is one of the deadliest viruses known to man. It is a form of hemorrhagic fever with diarrhea, vomiting, as well as internal and external bleeding as its symptoms.